Drishti – Santa Barbara Yoga Store: Yoga Clothing, Workout Clothes, & Yoga Supplies

The business world, blogs, and the yoga clothing scene specifically were all atwitter today with the biggest news to hit the yoga apparel scene in quite some time. The front page of today’s New York Times’ business section featured an article about Lululemon Athletica and seaweed which sent Lululemon stocks diving. Apparently, Lululemon produces a line of clothing called VitaSea which they advertise as containing 24% seaweed, and whose hangtags claim that the fabric “releases marine amino acids, minerals and vitamins into the skin upon contact with moisture” while at the same time reducing stress and providing detoxifying benefits.

However, the New York Times took it upon themselves to have two shirts from the VitaSea line tested by two independent laboratories, and the results from both labs reported no evidence of seaweed in Lululemon’s clothing. This has raised obvious questions about the way that Lululemon represents itself and its products, but more importantly, it will hopefully bring attention to the larger issue of the recent proliferation of “natural” and “organic” fabrics into the mainstream clothing market. In today’s environmentally precarious world, it’s important for us to make conscious choices about the practices we support via the dollars that we spend. Choosing “organic cotton”, for example, is noble indeed, but does that simple label of “organic” truly tell the whole story of a garment’s manufacturing process? Is the organic cotton that went into your t-shirt authentic, U.S.-certified organic cotton, or is it imported from a country whose standards for “organic” are extremely lenient? Perhaps that sweatshirt you just purchased was labelled “organic”, but what about the ink used to screenprint the design onto the back? And the sequins adorning the arms and the buttons lining the front?

The word “organic” (or “bamboo” or “hemp” or “soy fibers”, etc.) has become in many cases an easy end to the conversation about the sustainability of clothing. Several companies do operate in true alignment with their espoused principles, such as the highly-respected retailer Patagonia. But others seem to pay lip service to the environmental cause while actually only meeting such standards at their bare minimum requirements. (We should all, for example, be questioning the integrity behind the so-called “organic” salad greens hawked at Wal Mart these days…)

But back to this Lululemon business. The whole mix-up is probably, as the company claims, a major oversight – and not an intentional misrepresentation of a product on their part. Lululemon simply “trusted” the claims made by the fabric supplier and did not have the fabric independently tested to ensure that it lived up to the claims they chose to display on their hangtags. And in the end, most people probably don’t really care whether their t-shirt actually contains seaweed or not. However, aside from the fact that the New York Times reports that it’s the responsibility of companies to have all of their products tested, if companies like Lululemon simply “trust” their suppliers, and consumers, in turn, simply “trust” companies like Lululemon when they claim that their products are made from natural fibers, where does that leave the environment in this equation?

To see the actual New York Times article, click here.

To see other interesting news commentary on this story, click here.